


the furnace of my Lyctorhood

by ThatAloneOne



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book: Harrow the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Gen, Implied Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28123668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/pseuds/ThatAloneOne
Summary: You don’t know how long you stood there, frozen with her, but seeing her immobile was worse than anything you’d experienced before. Seeing her still felt like a planet’s still-warm lifeblood was spilling over your hands.or: the Sleeper's fuckery makes Gideon visible in Palamedes's River bubble.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	the furnace of my Lyctorhood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crookedspoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/gifts).



> Canon-typical angst, body horror, etcetera but no warnings beyond that.

_“Your **cavalier** , Reverend Daughter—”_

_Has become the furnace of my Lyctorhood.”_

* * *

You and the necromancer of the Sixth House threw yourself against the door in an attempt to brace it, but the bubble in the River had forgotten which way the door swung and you fell stumbling into the hall. The rain hadn’t — couldn’t — make its way inside, not with this part of Canaan House relatively intact but it was not _not_ raining, the slick nothingness that had once outlined this remembered hallway dripping like melting fat.

Someone was standing in the hallway, just out of Sextus’s original sightline. You blinked and blinked, and with each pass of your eyelids she grew clearer, like your eyelids were clearing away a sheen of oil on the glass between seen and unseen. The person standing outside Sextus’s River prison was wearing a Ninth robe, of all things, but she had seemingly forgotten to put on even the simplest sacramental paint. With no skull, your attention was instead drawn to her shock of distinctly un-Ninth red hair. It was windblown and a little sweaty, a few curls plastered to her temple. She was almost teetering, her balance off and mouth hanging open like she was reeling just as much at seeing you as you were at seeing her.

You don’t know how long you stood there, frozen with her, but seeing her immobile somehow was worse than anything you’d experienced before. Seeing her still felt like a planet’s still-warm lifeblood was spilling over your hands. Sextus was pulling you back and away and you were too far gone and too used to being the Lord’s saint, untouchable, that you didn’t notice what he had done until the door closed in front of your face and cut her off from you.

You lurched forward but Sextus was sliding the deadbolt home on the wrong-hinged door. He turned, bracing his back to the door as best he could and stared at you. “Ninth,” he said, and stopped. His eyes were locked with yours and now you were both frozen in place even as the rest of this ghost of Canaan House blurred back into impossible movement. The wind howled outside the tiny window and the sea churned but whatever Sextus saw in your eyes was apparently more concerning than the shredding of the River’s reality. You felt trapped, bereft of your necromancy and pinned in place by your heavy bones. Something wheezed distantly, and it took a moment for you to realize it wasn’t your own panicked breathing. It was too regular, too loud, too far away. Air rasped bloody on your tongue.

“The Sleeper,” you heard yourself say, the words foreign in your mouth. Your hand moved before you could think it through, and you wrestled Sextus for the feeble deadbolt on the door. “Open it,” you snapped, “let me-”

“No,” he said, and he was somehow keeping you from the door despite his starved-thin body. Wildly, you thought you should have been able to push through him, past him, assert your living will on his ghostly form. Your hands were shaking too much to be much use but you tried for the knob again anyway. Sextus was flat against the door now, a second layer between you and the things that lay outside.

“Nonagesimus,” he said, purposefully not frantic, “this place is held together by a single theorem. I can’t change the parameters but what comes to me can change the parameters of this place, and you’ve brought something with you that _is_. You have to go.”

“Let me out,” you said again. Your hands had stopped shaking, or maybe the rest of you had started. “Warden of the Sixth House, you _must_ -”

Sextus finally dropped that awful eye contact and you felt scooped out inside, your ribs circling around empty air. He said: “She isn’t real.”

The emptiness inside you howled and you were suddenly more furious than you had ever been before. “Neither is this place and still you seem concerned. What if-”

She was there,” he said, and braced against the door as something rattled it. You wanted out. You didn’t want the Sleeper in. This froze you more effectively than the necromancy you no longer possessed. Sextus’s voice shuddered with the effort of holding it alone. “Before I came here, before I died, I saw her in the hall. She’s an echo.”

“You don’t _know_ -”

“I was holding her,” he said, and you shuddered against the memory of necromancy holding you in place, Mercy’s knot in your throat. “I didn’t shut the door here and I held her. She’s not here.”

“No,” you whispered, and you didn’t know why.

“Harrow,” Sextus said. He had stopped fighting you for control of the door but somehow your fingers were refusing to move on the latch. The Sleeper was right outside, no matter how much something in you was whispering that you could still save her, that Ninth girl who shouldn’t have been here. “Harrow, I’m so sorry.”

Instead of speaking, you made an agonized sound that was not a word. 

You have to go,” Sextus told you. The door rattled him again, and this time you stepped forward to help. “If you brought it, it’ll follow you out.” He met your gaze again, his grey eyes bright with awe you didn’t feel you deserved. He said, so fond it hurt, “Go.”

You went.

* * *

When you woke, it was on a sheet, the grass crushed distantly beneath your body. Camilla watched you turn and cough up a mouthful of blood and did not try to touch you, which was more of a kindness than you had expected. When you were able to sit upright, your head took over the malfunctioning and you ached and ached. You were half-convinced that if you tried hard enough you could blink the film of blood from your eyes and see her again. Your sword lay under the palm of your hand, too blunted by your poor care of it to do anything more than cool your Lyctor-hot skin.

“So?” Camilla said. For the first time, you saw the desperation under her pain, a twin to what now burned under your skin. Your headache redoubled, but you told her what you had seen of her necromancer and her relief had been a sword to your heart. You burned and you brushed away tears that were only half made of blood. You wept and I thought: maybe you _did_ want to save me. 

**Author's Note:**

> Usual end note goes here when its no longer anonymous! And note thanking my lovely beta!
> 
> This place during chapter 33 of Harrow the Ninth, dragging canon a little sideways before letting it go so it can spring back into place for the rest of the story. Just... assume in the gap there between the book quote and the fic that they had the rest of the canon discussion they needed to have. Handwave handwave. 
> 
> Thank you crookedspoon for participating in Yuletide, it gave me the push to actually write this idea I had when reading Harrow. One day I will write a Gideon fic that isn't angst, but that day is not today. I hope it hit the spot!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] the furnace of my Lyctorhood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28557501) by [aether (ThatAloneOne)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/pseuds/aether)




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